Posts by Doctor Syntax

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Re: What are we going to do about the embedded devices?

"Obviously, over time, old kit dies and is replaced with new kit that should no longer contain outdated language."

The entire problem arises from the fact that words, at least in English, have long been able to have multiple meanings. This seems to be at the root of your idea of "outdated" - it seems that the offence seekers want words to have only one. What's even more peculiar is that they seem to only want a word to have its most offensive meaning even if it's one, for example "blacklist", which only they attribute to it.

If we are to update the language this is a Herculean task. Perhaps you could start be looking up the dictionary definition of "set", tell us which is the most offensive meaning which should be retained and then suggest alternatives for all the other meanings.

Re: Sigh...

"I think its a new problem"

Unfortunately it isn't. It's Puritanism updated. These things go in cycles. Bowdlerisation and high Victorian prudery followed in the late 18th & the 19th centuries. Periodically we get outbursts of of people looking for things to be offended by. Samuel Johnson's riposte is often the best way of dealing with them.

Ordnance Survey recruits AR developer to build 'geolocated quests' to help get Brit couch potatoes exercising outdoors

I'm just exploring some links provided here at the mo: http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/

For historic maps they should have added https://maps.nls.uk/ although why the National Library of Scotland turns out to be the best place for historic maps of England remains to be explained.

I wonder how many points of interest this would feature. The likely result, should it actually become popular, would be a relatively small number of hotspots attracting the users and overflowing any car parking.

Hard to believe but Congress just approved an IoT security law and it doesn't totally suck

When the standards are written perhaps UL will certify products meeting them in the same way as they do for electrical standards. That would provide even more arm-twisting.

Test and Trace chief Dido Harding prompted to self-isolate by NHS COVID-19 app

"If every contact of someone self-isolating had to self-isolate, there would be no staff in hospitals or schools."

And that's why every contact should be told to test and then self-isolate or not based on that.

Plenty more dog food needed

Is it too much to hope that as soon as this period of self-isolation ends (both for her and the PM) that another contact leads to another self-isolation period?

It looks as if this would be the only thing to prompt the realisation that rather than blind self-isolation the better option would be to require the subject to get tested and then isolate or not based on the result.

The app is a presumptive test with a possibility* of giving a false positive. The correct response to a positive presumptive test is to follow up with a definitive test.

* Have they any estimate of the probability that? If so we should be told what it it. If not they should at least make an effort to find out.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledges £12bn green economy package

Re: How exactly?

"You can have two chargers per lamppost"

Doesn't cut it when the ratio is much higher. Even if you only need to charge it every few nights you're going to need cooperative neighbours and a rota to get a chance when you need it.

Re: How exactly?

"I don't want to have to deal with the loss of the feeling of freedom that it gives me."

I don't think TPTB have ever been happy with us having the degree of freedom that the car brought. They probably had the same attitude to the bicycle.

You live in a property where installation of a charging point is feasible, right? Millions of car users don't.

Re: Not a chance !

Given that there are large tracts of dense housing, urban and, in my case rural, where there is no off-street parking in the form of drives and on-street parking is bumper to bumper it's not a question time but of feasibility. The only solution would be to knock down the houses, rebuild at lower density and find somewhere else to build houses for those displaced. Unless there's a subsidy to do this existing houses in these areas will be blighted.

I lie. It's not the only solution. The other solution is to reorganise society so we are no longer dependent on the car. In another post I described housing near here. When they were built there was no problem with car parking - cars didn't exist but there workplaces within walking distance. However for decades planning policy has been to separate workplaces and housing. As we're in between several conurbations most of the residents in the houses I described will be employed in cities over 20 miles away for which there is no effective public transport service.

We have a problem which has been created over several decades by public policy. It is a complex problem of which carbon dioxide production by cars is no more than a symptom. No amount of hand-waving at the symptom is going to make it go away in 15 to 20 years or ever. It will need hard thinking and, like all problem solving, that depends on recognising what the actual problem is in the first place.

Re: Not a chance !

"cars on peoples drives and on street corners"

Cars on drives and street corners are the easy bit. Not far from here are several hundred metres of road with houses opening directly onto the footpath. There are cars parked there more or less bunper to bumper outside the owners' houses. For a good deal of that there are houses and therefore cars lining both sides of the road. And that doesn't even take into account the Pennine phenomenon of the stacked house - the house that opens onto the pavement may have another house underneath it accessed by a flight of steps at the end of the row, or, on the other side of the road, another house above it. How anybody expects all those to be replaced with electric cars all being charged I don't know.

"What's more, the government is promising a homegrown industry to make batteries."

In fact they said some time ago that the UK would become a world leader. I suppose that's why Honda decided to move out of the UK to concentrate on producing EVs.

Northern Ireland announces £165m full-fibre rollout funded by 2017 DUP agreement with Theresa May's UK government

Re: Hmm

"Give it a rest, Brexit has happened."

No. It happens on Jan 1st. You ain't seen nothing yet.

And with the version of Brexit NI gets including a border in the Irish Sea broadband will be the least of their problems.

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

I see he's working hard with the revolving door right up to the end to try to give every US citizen a turn at being in the administration.

Re: It is unclear what President Trump hopes to achieve

"Not sure what any member of the Congress hopes to gain by not putting a stop to this madness by firing the loser right now."

I've been wondering if they might resort to that and what the trigger might be.

Re: Whats to come

The successor might well have an eye to the future under the new administration and agree with Krebs. He'd be much harder for Trump to fire. To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness!.

Re: Come to watch the lunatic

"he was nonetheless a military genius"

When he was winning. Just like any other general.

Alleged Ponzi mastermind on the run from FBI hid in lake with sea-scooter, collared after he surfaced half-hour later

A trail of bubbles is a novelty. It doesn't have quite the forensic significance as a trail of footprints but in the circumstances they didn't need that.

BRICS bloc – home to 40 percent of humanity – wants to drive global e-commerce consumer protection rules

BRICS - it's a good while since I heard that, I had to think for a moment to remember what it meant.

I wonder if they'll let us in when it finally dawns on BoJo that it's cold outside.

UK, Canada could rethink the whole 'ban Huawei' thing post-Trump, whispers Huawei

Re: Arresting officer decides not to testify?

The prosecution could decide not to call him which makes their job a little difficult. But the defence could decide to call him instead and get to treat him as a hostile witness.

Re: Without us, you'll 'widen the north-south digital divide'

Given that the original interview was in The Grauniad it's possible that the North starts at Euston Rd.

Tablets and Chromebooks are hot, towers and desktops are not: El Reg combs through Q3 PC numbers

Two words

Mature market.

Re: Who NEEDS a desktop?

"I have seen a guy admin-ing his server on an i-phone."

Back in the day i.e. the day of this http://www.gsmchoice.co.uk/en/catalogue/nokia/9110/Nokia-9110.html I was the subject of one visiting US Informix User Group promoter shouting over to his mate "Look at this, he's DBAing his box on his phone." Those were the days of being able to have a dial-in modem on the back of the box and using it to collect the local email to check overnight jobs had run OK.

Edinburgh Woollen Mill ransomware claim: Crims demand cash from target in administration

It's so hard to get good staff these days.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

Re: But to be the advocate of the devil

"As long as they can shovel ads in our faces"

Which is exactly as long as you tolerate it by paying them.

Re: But to be the advocate of the devil

"Are you too young to remember times when e-mails service had to be paid for."

I got as far as this. I pay for an email service on which I can set up and tear down email addresses as needed for anything important. I still have an old Hotmail address and that's the one that gets the genuine* phishing attempts - although MS are fairly good at trapping most of them some get through and a surprising proportion are those pretending to be from themselves.

*My bank, building society and even local council keep arranging to have what look like phishing emails sent by 3rd parties impersonating themselves. The closest thing for authentication is that they arrive at the correct email address.

Let me correct that - I can exclude the bank because I told them a few years ago that if they wouldn't authenticate emails I sent to their address for reporting phishing I'd close down the address. They didn't so I did.

"They should stop kidding themselves that complaining about ad-blockers will magically make people decide that they both want to see the adverts, and that they will deliberately follow them."

They're not interested in that. All they're interested in is getting money from the advertiser for shoving the ad in people's faces. If the advertiser loses money by that it's not their problem.

"The adverts are usually more reserved in how they are implemented and some effort has usually been taken to integrate them into the site in a sensible way. "

They're also more likely to be relevant to the page the viewer has chosen to read.

Re: Wasting their time

How often do we have to say this: The only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.

They sell it to advertisers. Providing they can sell that successfully they're home and dry. As far as they're concerned it doesn't matter if the advertisers waste money because that wasted money ends up in their pockets.

"I purposely wipe out all traces of local storage, cookies, browsing history"

I have a browser set to wipe all storage on exit for this purpose or for any site that seems too keen on Javascript. It seems to get used more and more often.

Re: Just say no

You mean you're not getting those already?

Re: They just don't get it.

"Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them."

No. It's beneficial to the advertising industry because it enables them to sell these targeting services to advertisers. As we're all aware this results in advertisers being charged for adverts and the targeting service to punters who've either (a) already bought what the advertiser's trying to flog and don't need another or (b) are being targeted with something quite irrelevant because of the quirks of the AI/ML algorithm whose results are irrelevant but can't be explained because it's a black box.

The advertisers are the mugs in this game.

Re: They just don't get it.

Of course. The only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.

Re: They just don't get it.

Nevertheless I wonder what proportion of those in the advertising industry, including the actual advertisers don't block ads in their own browsers. I'm sure they all find ads annoying but don't actually connect this reaction to any possible audience response to what they do for a living.

Re: They just don't get it.

A few days ago SWMBO was trying to look up Pears Cyclopaedia on Amazon. I don't know if that actually came up but she was complaining about all the junk; I think there was even a girlie calendar on there. It doesn't bode well for this idea of Alexa trying to double-guess users the product.

Re: They just don't get it.

"Just like predictive text."

For a long time I've contrived to get auto-suggest out of the Google search. That no longer seems to work - an no, even if it gets rid of it I am not going to sign in to Google. So now the browser home page is DuckDuckGo. In the long run pissing off users doesn't do you any good.

Re: They just don't get it.

Marketing people are narcissists who are convinced the world is eagerly waiting for their next fart, brain or otherwise, so of course they think people want to be tracked to avoid any risk of being deprived.

Heavy-duty case closed: Peli tried to steal peli.co.uk from rightful owner, says Nominet

peli.co.uk is now quoting el Reg's headline.

Pass us a tissue: Capita CFO calls it quits, talks of 'privilege' to work at 'centre' of biz that 'touches the lives of millions'

"Butcher, along with CEO Jon Lewis, did the decent thing in March by taking a 25 per cent pay cut"

IOW it became less of a privilege.

Micropayments company Coil distributes new privacy policy with email that puts users' addresses in the ‘To:’ field

"how we interface with our mailing list provider"

In other words the email didn't come from Coil but from some mailing house spoofing Coil in the From: field. Another business that takes security so seriously that it trains its customers to be phished.

KDE maintainers speak on why it is worth looking beyond GNOME

With the exception really H/W challenged boxes I've never quite grasped the "how light can it be" argument. If you want light use a kernel and Busybox, nothing else. If that doesn't meet your needs then we're just into a trade-off between those needs and the resources required to meet them.

Re: “There was really nothing good one could say about it, but it was popular.”

I think HP New Era add on to 3 might have had something to do with it. That added a lot of OO stuff (so called) to the UI. This became standard in W95 (HP was listed in copyrights). New Era itself used a mass off obscurely named files and I think these were so cumbersome that they got swept up into a monolithic registry although OS/2 might have done that before 95.

Re: Had me thinking I'd give it a try

I suppose that's the difference between effectively impossible and really impossible.

Re: The "Problem" with Linux

Not here it isn't. A bit of playing about with themes sorts it out. I use a Window Decoration theme called Reactionary - slightly mis-named because a CDE theme is available for the even more reactionary.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Re: 50 years ago ...

"Yorkshire waters meters don't display a reading"

Ours does but I still haven't worked out how it gets the reading to a hand-held device several metres away when it's encased in a steel tube topped with a cast iron cover. Is the gap round the flap in the cover the right dimensions for a slot aerial because other than that it looks like a Faraday cage.?

Re: 50 years ago ...

There's a web site for CEO email addresses. Just search for those two words. Of course it depends on the company as to whether the address will get you anywhere.

Re: 50 years ago ...

A Geordie on PlusNet? My usual experience is that PlusNet agents have no accent whatsoever, at least not from my PoV.

When I signed up with them I did a double-take because the next page had a banner with a landscape image that just missed my house by about a couple of hundred feet; had they matched up the post code? Then I realised it was just a stock shot and the luck of the draw.

Re: you never see reports of gas bills for millions

"Also water is not a scarce commodity here in Scotland."

It's not a scarce commodity in Yorkshire either but we still have to pay for it.

At least it hasn't been scarce since the time in the early 90s when a drought and distribution problems resulted in just about every tanker suitable for carrying potable liquids had been chartered to carry it from wherever to Scammonden reservoir. It seemed any drive journey along the M62 passed a tanker on the opposite carriage way about every minute or so.

Facebook's Giphy slurp remains on hold after UK competition regulator demands more info

What fraction of $400m would it cost FB to develop a program that, on press of a button, inserts a funny GIF into the message? I'm sure plenty of commentards would be willing to do it for them at half the price. Maybe even a quarter if the competition got tough.